Francona: The Red Sox Years (28 page)

Batting ninth, playing shortstop, Pedroia made his major league debut after the meeting. He lined into a double play in his first big league at-bat, then hit a single to center off Angel lefty Joe Saunders. He finished the night, 1–3, and the Sox lost their sixth straight.

Lester snapped the losing streak the next night to improve his rookie record to 7–2, but he still wasn’t feeling right. He had night sweats, was losing weight, and couldn’t shake a cold. When the ball club flew north to Seattle, Lester’s parents sent him to see his uncle Paul, an internist in greater Seattle.

“My parents and I went to the hospital early in the morning, not thinking much of it, but we were there until four in the afternoon,” said Lester. “The emergency room doctor came out and told me I either had testicular cancer or lymphoma.”

Lester reported to Francona when he got to the clubhouse.

“It’s amazing how quickly you can change gears,” said Francona. “Before then, I’d been all about how do we get him so he can pitch into the seventh inning? Suddenly, it’s all about this being a kid I care about a lot.”

John Henry arranged to have Lester, his parents, and uncle fly back to Boston on Henry’s private jet.

“We all have our complaints about the workplace, but in the tough times they’d move the earth,” said the manager.

Before taking their only child across the country for a battery of tests at Massachusetts General Hospital, John and Katie Lester met with Francona at Safeco Field.

“We will take care of your son,” promised the manager.

Lester is only a year and a half older than Nick Francona, the oldest child of Terry and Jacque Francona. The manager’s nickname for Lester is “Junior.”

While Lester was at Mass General, things got worse for Francona and the Red Sox. They lost their final six games of the trip, three in Seattle, three in Oakland. Manny toyed with his bosses daily, changing his injury from a hamstring to a sore knee. The Sox sent Ramirez for an MRI in southern California and announced there was no structural damage. Manny’s malady was reframed as patellar tendinitis. Meanwhile, Lester and his doctor-uncle were calling the manager to explain the fear and ambiguity of his status at Mass General.

Francona was spitting blood into a towel when he met with reporters after the finale in Seattle. He had to restrain himself from snapping when radio reporter Jonny Miller accidently banged his cane into the manager’s knee. The Sox offense had been smothered again, and Francona spit out some truth when the inevitable Manny question was asked.

“If a guy says he can’t play, I’m not going to make him play,” he said. “Go ask him. He says he can’t fucking play. We were hoping a couple of days off would be enough. Where it stands now, I don’t know.”

The manager’s bloodletting was due to him biting his tongue while on blood thinners. He was supposed to keep his INR blood level between 2.5 and 3, but it spiked to 5.1 during the road trip.

“If somebody had punched me then, I probably would have died,” he said. “I bit my tongue, and it didn’t stop bleeding for days.”

A perfect metaphor for the trip, and the season.

Multiple injuries to key players contributed to the train wreck. Francona was forced to use Loretta at first, Youkilis in left, a no-longer-capable Javier Lopez behind the plate, and Kyle Snyder and Kason Gabbard as starters. They went 9–21 in August, the franchise’s worst calendar month since 1985 under John McNamara.

“We were just going down like soft shit in the rain,” said Francona. “That’s when Mike Lowell stepped up and turned into a real leader. We had young kids coming up, and I wanted to make sure we did things right. Lowell gutted it out and played every day. He set an example. Those were things I was trying to hang my hat on.”

The white flag went up August 31 when Theo traded Wells to San Diego for catcher George Kottaras. Wells had been asking for a trade throughout the season and never seemed happy in Boston, but he pitched well for most of his two seasons at Fenway.

“I always liked David, and he will always be able to throw strikes,” said Francona. “But when we traded him, all I could think was,
We made it through this without anything really bad happening.
”

The message was clear. There was still a month to play in the 2006 season, but the Sox were already thinking about the future. The Wells deal indicated it was all about 2007.

The day after the Wells trade the Sox announced that Lester had been diagnosed with large-cell lymphoma, an aggressive non-Hodgkins disease. The Red Sox connection to cancer cure is well documented. In 1953, after the Boston Braves left the Hub for Milwaukee, the Jimmy Fund became the official charity of the Red Sox. Ted Williams befriended Dr. Sidney Farber, the godfather of modern chemotherapy.

“Dr. Farber always told me, ‘We’re gonna find a way to save these kids!’ Williams later recalled. “And goddammit, he did!”

With the help of the Red Sox, the Jimmy Fund has saved thousands of lives. For more than a half-century, Red Sox players have visited cancer patients at Children’s Hospital and the Jimmy Fund Clinic. An annual Red Sox flagship telethon raises tens of millions of dollars. Sox pitcher Bob Stanley was a champion of the Jimmy Fund, then benefited from the clinic’s research when his own son, Kyle, was successfully treated for a malignant sinus tumor. Mike Andrews, second baseman with the 1967 Red Sox, was chairman of the Jimmy Fund for more than three decades after he retired from baseball.

In the days and weeks after the disclosure of Lester’s cancer, Francona protected Lester’s privacy furiously, admonishing any reporter who attempted to reach Lester’s family. The manager guarded the pitcher and his family as he would have protected his own family. Before starting treatment in September, Lester visited Francona at Fenway. Then, after a single treatment at Mass General, Lester went home and was treated at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

“Tito was great with me,” said Lester. “I don’t think with any other manager I could have had that comfort level.”

Lester, Papelbon, and Pedroia were the core of the Red Sox future. They all were scouted, drafted, and developed by Theo Epstein’s baseball operations staff. It was important that they do well when they got to the big leagues. Papelbon was an established major league closer (35 saves in 2006) by the time Lester went on the shelf with his life-threatening illness. Pedroia was another matter. The kid struggled in his first days as a big leaguer. In 31 games at the end of the 2006 season, Pedroia batted .191 and committed four errors. He looked a little out of shape.

Still, he had his moments.

One such moment came on a sleepy Saturday afternoon at the Rogers Centre in Toronto. The Red Sox were playing out the string and had call-up Pedroia batting leadoff against Toronto’s highly touted A. J. Burnett. Pedroia led off the game with a home run, his second big league home run. He circled the bases quickly, trotted back to the dugout, flung his helmet to the floor, and screamed, “Ninety-six miles per hour coming in, 196 miles per hour going out!”

“Simmer down, Napoleon,” said Lowell.

“That got our attention,” said Francona. “I think we were half-asleep at that point, but he woke us up. It got us to thinking that we might see some good things out of this kid, even though we were struggling and he was struggling. The kid was unbelievable.”

Manny played in seven games in September, batting .211 with one homer. Ortiz hit seven homers in the final month, finishing with a Sox record of 54 homers, but he missed the protection of Ramirez. Ortiz was not happy with the Ramirez disappearing act. Big Papi wanted Manny hitting behind him in his quest for 60 homers, and he was annoyed that he was constantly asked to speak for Ramirez. Fans and media often twinned them as brotherly Dominican sluggers, but Ortiz and Ramirez were not particularly close.

The 2006 Red Sox finished 86–76, in third place, 11 games behind the Yankees. They were not the Idiots, which was okay with the manager. Seeds had been planted for the harvest of 2007.

“We had some guys that hung in there through some tough times, and I was proud of that,” said Francona. “We were running some unusual pitching out there, bringing guys up every day, and it was hard. A lot of guys didn’t stop playing. I remember thinking,
This is gonna help us,
and it did. Guys were really being professional. I was so proud of that team.”

CHAPTER 10

T
HE MANAGER AND THE
cancer-stricken pitcher cut a deal. Terry Francona didn’t need a lot of information or detail, but he wanted to hear from Lester after every treatment.

The text messages would come every three weeks.

“Hey, Tito, just checking in,” Lester would type. “Had my treatment today. I’m okay.”

That’s the way it went until the first week of December 2006. Francona was at the winter meetings with Epstein in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, when his phone rang. Jon Lester calling. No text. The manager was alarmed. Something might be wrong.

He picked up and heard the voice of Lester on the other end.

“I’m cancer-free,” Lester told his manager. “You’re my first call.”

“That’s so great, Junior,” said Francona. “Thanks so much for calling. Now go get ready for spring training.”

Ending the call, Francona put down the phone and started crying. He’d been holding on to his emotions for months. He hadn’t talked to anybody about it.

Then, and now, Lester made it a habit to talk about Francona as a paternal presence in his professional life. The lefty was fond of saying his manager had been like a second father to him.

“That made me feel good, but I didn’t ever want to say something like that,” said Francona. “You only have one father. But you see these kids come up through the organization and you get close. You care about them. You see them grow up. You know more about them than you know about a guy you sign as a free agent who comes in to help you win games.”

“I think that phone call caught him off guard,” Lester said later. “I don’t have any brothers or sisters. I wanted the Red Sox family to know that I was cancer-free. I was ready to come back and pitch.”

“It was the most important thing that could have happened at the winter meetings,” said Francona. “The meetings were already a success.”

Lester was out of the picture for the 2007 rotation. With Wells gone and Schilling slowly breaking down, Theo Epstein looked to the Far East to find pitching help. John Henry was in a spending state of mind, and Theo knew how to get some pitching without giving up any players or draft picks. Thus began the expensive courtship of Daisuke Matsuzaka.

Matsuzaka made his bones in the famed Koshien high school tournament in Japan, pitched eight seasons with the Seibu Lions, and won the inaugural World Baseball Classic, beating Team Cuba in the championship final in San Diego in the spring of 2006. He was targeted by Red Sox international scouting director Craig Shipley and Pacific Rim scout Jon Deeble.

The complex Japanese “posting” system was the first obstacle the Red Sox encountered. Major league teams interested in Japanese players were required to file sealed bids for exclusive rights to negotiate with a Japanese player.

After reading the reports on Matsuzaka, Francona told Epstein, “It sounds like this guy is exactly what we need. It would be a hard check to write, I understand that, but we don’t have to give up any players. This is a chance to get a pitcher without losing anybody.”

The Red Sox shocked baseball by making a posting bid of $51.1 million for exclusive rights to negotiate with Matsuzaka. The runner-up New York Mets bid slightly less than $40 million. The ever-cool Epstein was sweating. The Sox were serious.

The next step was the courting process. Matsuzaka was represented by Scott Boras, who had a well-deserved reputation for holding out longer than anybody else, then getting a record-breaking deal. Lucchino’s secret weapon to counter Boras was Daniel Okimoto, a widely respected political science professor at Stanford who’d gone to Princeton with Lucchino. A Japanese American, Okimoto had many contacts in Japan and understood Japanese culture far better than Lucchino, Francona, or the Red Sox owners. Okimoto had been Bill Bradley’s roommate at Princeton when Lucchino was a backup point guard on Princeton’s NCAA Final Four team. During Lucchino’s San Diego years, Okimoto served the Padres as an unpaid adviser.

It was Okimoto who suggested a lavish get-to-know-one-another dinner at the Pacific Palisades home of Tom Werner. Okimoto convinced Lucchino that a quiet dinner in a private home would be a perfect way for the Sox to introduce themselves and make their pitch to the Japanese legend.

“I was convinced that if Matsuzaka saw the commitment, the excellence, the successes, of the Boston Red Sox senior management team—ownership and senior management team—he would be enormously impressed and would leave the house wanting to sign with the Boston Red Sox and thinking that he would be a Boston Red Sox,” Okimoto told author Ian Browne in
Dice-K: The First Season of the $100 Million Man.
“I said, ‘If you show this side to yourself of basic honesty and decency and excellence, no one including Scott Boras will be able to demonize the Red Sox.’”

Theo told Francona to pack for a quick trip to Los Angeles. And to bring a gift for Daisuke Matsuzaka.

“We were warned that he was going to bring a gift for us,” said Lucchino.

Unable to think of anything special, Francona drove to Dick’s Sporting Goods and hastily purchased a New England Patriots number 54, Tedy Bruschi, jersey. Then he went to the airport.

The gathering at Werner’s home included Henry, Werner, Lucchino, Epstein, Francona, Boras, Matsuzaka, Okimoto, and a pair of interpreters. They dined on pan-seared Chilean sea bass. After dinner, Okimoto called for the gifts to be brought out. The Sox had presents for Matsuzaka’s wife and child, who were not in attendance, gifts for Boras, and gifts for the pitcher. They also brought a replica of the 2004 World Series trophy for Matsuzaka’s inspection. Matsuzaka’s wife was given a children’s book written by Red Sox wives and tour books of Boston. Boras unwrapped a clock, a token of appreciation designed to remind the agent that time was wasting.